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GRIM-FACED Defence Secretary John Reid shared centre stage at his son's wedding yesterday - with a villain wanted by police.

Tony Blair's most trusted minister and fugitive Ronnie Campbell - the father of the bride - stood side by side on the steps of Westminster Cathedral.

The Sunday Mail can reveal a warrant was issued for the arrest of Campbell, 47, on Monday after a violent incident involving a woman.

Campbell, who sported a gold cravat and kilt, was the target of a recent gangland hit.~~DRUGSTajik authorities have claimed repeatedly that neither the US nor NATO exerts any pressure on the drug warlords inside Afghanistan. "There's absolutely no threat to the labs inside Afghanistan," said Avaz Yuldashov of the Tajikistan Drug Control Agency. "Our intelligence shows there are 400 labs making heroin there, and 80 of them are situated right along our border ... Drug trafficking from Afghanistan is the main source of support for international terrorism now," Yuldashov pointed out last year.[1]

It was striking in the 1980s that the CIA, in its choice of Afghan mujahedin leaders to back against the Soviet Union, passed over those with indigenous support in favor of those, notably Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who dominated the heroin trade. The result was to enhance Hekmatyar's power until he became a leading heroin trafficker, not just in Afghanistan but in the world.[5]

In the wake of 9/11, Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator, has claimed to possess information linking the American 9/11, and much else, to massive drug-trafficking which has corrupted high level U.S. officials. Among other things, she has claimed that the U.S. has never gone after top-level drug traffickers, because this would upset "certain foreign relations." But it would also expose certain of our elected officials, who have significant connections with high-level drugs- and weapons-smuggling – and thus with the criminal underground, even with the terrorists themselves.....[113]

How many of these foreign 'criminals' might have links to powerful people in government?

~~

The Kurdish and Turkish gang led by Abdullah Baybasin has been linked to 90 per cent of the heroin trade in Britain.

Abdullah Baybasin is linked to more than a dozen brutal murders.

Abdullah Baybasin and his gang came to Britain from Turkey in 1997 to claim asylum. According to the Guardian, the gang were apparently allowed to come to Britain because Abdullah had links to Customs & Excise.

There are 'good productivity figures'. The economy is 'a low tax economy'. There was 'strong growth' in 2005.Interest rates are 'historically low'.US property prices are about half the level in the UK.Consumer assets have been growing as fast as consumer debt. Most consumers are 'not very stressed financially'.The trade deficit is not a problem so long as money continues to come in from Asia.

But

Companies such as General Motors and United Airlines are having problems.

The Japanese and Europeans 'produce better cars' than the Americans.

Oil prices are soaring. This hurts parts of the economy.

Worldwide, there is allegedly some reluctance to buy American products. This is the Iraq-effect.

There have been scandals at Enron and WorldCom.

There is a growing gap between rich and poor. Executive pay has soared.

There may be a housing bubble in certain areas.

According to economic commentator Kurt Richebacher, the cause of the trade deficit is the low levels of savings and capital investment in the USA.

If money stops flowing in from countries such as China and Saudi Arabia, then there is a big problem.

Writing in the Financial Times in December 2004, Barry Eichengreen pointed out that at current exchange rates the US current account deficit was on an “explosive path” and set to widen from its current level of between 5 and 6 percent of US gross domestic product (GDP) to 8 percent by 2008 and 12 percent in 2010.

Eichengreen suggested that deficits of this size could not continue to be financed indefinitely through the inflow of foreign capital. At some point foreign investors “would pull the plug, and the dollar and the US economy would come crashing down.”

Friday, April 28, 2006

John Profumo was UK Defence minister in a Conservative Government. Profumo's mistress was Christine Keeler who was sleeping with a Russian naval attache, Eugene Ivanov, widely suspected of being a spy.

What about ministers in Tony Blair's Labour government?

Robin Cook was at one time Foreign Secretary and in charge of MI6. Robin Cook had a mistress, his secretary Gaynor Regan.

David Blunkett was Home Secretary and in charge of MI5. Blunkett had a mistress, Kimberly Quinn.

Derry Irvine was Lord Chancellor, the cabinet minister in charge of the legal system.Irvine made off with the wife of fellow cabinet minister Donald Dewar.

Thursday, April 27, 2006

I haven't read this book. I was only sent an email, posted a couple of days ago, referring to a couple of reviews.

A quick bit of googling tells me that Richard Parry, the author, was correspondent for the British Independent newspaper for the period 1997-1999 covered by this book and has chosen violence as his theme for understanding recent Indonesian history.

Given the short time he was here, he could just as well have chosen kretek cigarettes or herbal medicine as his theme.

I've read a few online reviews of the book by journalists who may have seen a clip of a riot on CNN and none of them seem to portray the societal upheaval that I witnessed in that period. None of them convey the solidarity felt by residents here, but all have that element of touristic voyeurism.

Miko, a long-term resident, a regular reader of Jakartass and occasional commentator, has written the following review. It should save you the expense of buying the book.

Parry's book is a load of onanistic twaddle. While walking through a country in great turmoil all he tells us about is himself, how he is feeling, his emotions, what he is enduring, him, him, him.A good journalist should be able to report what is happening and convey the scene on the ground in precise objective terms. We couldn't give a flying fart what emotional turmoil they may be enduring, we're not interested no more than I care what the personal emotions of my plumber are as long as he makes a good job of restoring my shower fittings.Parry tells us that on the morning of the Trisakti shootings he was going to ask his girlfriend to marry him, he tells us how he felt about this and what it would mean for him but then after much agonising he decides not to. Then he goes to the university to watch the demo he stays for an hour or two and then goes back to the hotel where he is told about the shooting. He misses the biggest story in Indonesia in thirty years, but, hey, we know about his domestic situation, sheesh great journo.In East Timor everyone is cartoonish, the brave, quiet, proud, heroic, romantic Timorese, and the ugly, goonlike, thick, dirty Indonesians none of whom have a redeeming quality.Of course as soon as the first shots are fired he scarpers for the UN compound and stays there thus having no idea what was going on outside. But we do know that he was tired, emotional and contemplative oh and yes Timorese civilians were being massacred outside the walls. When the first evacuation plane comes he scrambles on board; well, he had no cigarettes left. What do you expect from courageous journalists? He doesn't record how many Timorese women and children he pushed out of the way to get on the plane.Back in Darwin he agonises for a month in various Irish bars before going back again. This time he sees lots of big burly Aussie and Brit soldiers, whom he clearly doesn't like and describes in insulting terms. You see sensitive souls such as him are offended by men who say "fuck" a lot. He passes over the fact that these brutes were the people who sorted the damn mess out while writers like him were wanking themselves into a coma.Sorry for the length of this review but I just finished the book last night and I needed to get it off my chest this morning.

Aangirfan comments: In his book, Richard Lloyd Parry makes no mention of the CIA/MI6 role in the toppling of both Sukarno and Suharto.

In one of the most dramatic success stories in modern addiction treatment, doctors in Switzerland have discovered that the provision of medically determined doses of heroin to heroin addicts significantly improves their health, lifestyle and reduces the amount of crime associated with drug use when they are permitted to leave the black market environment.The Swiss researchers concluded that:

· Both the number of criminal offenders and the number of offenses decreased by about 60% in the first six months of the program.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

From the Christian Science Monitor 25 April 2006: It seems that the blasts were the result of remote-controlled bombs, not suicide bombers. And they occurred in a market and busy restaurant area in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Dahab. Dahab is known for being a place that attracts... backpackers and budget tourists.

Most of the dead were Egyptians, who had been enjoying a Spring holiday in Dahab when the attacks occurred.

No Israelis were injured. "Channel 10 TV reported three Israelis were wounded in the blasts and were being evacuated to Israel. However, Israeli ambassador to Egypt Shalom Cohen later said the three were not wounded in the attacks. According to the Foreign Ministry, there were some 5,000 Israelis currently in Sinai at the time of the bombings."

The Hamas-led Palestinian government said it "strongly condemns this criminal act which flouts our religion, shakes Palestinian national security and works against Arab interests".

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit, on 20 April 2006, promised that Egypt would support the Palestinian government led by Hamas.

On 22 April 2006, Egyptian officials brokered an agreement between Hamas and Fatah. Hamas and Fatah pledged on 23 April 2006 to make an effort to iron out differences and work towards national unity.On 22 April 2006, Egypt said that Iran wants a diplomatic solution to the standoff with the international community over its atomic programme, but also insists on its right to peaceful nuclear technology. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki made the comments in a telephone conversation with his Egyptian counterpart Ahmed Abul Gheit, the official MENA news agency reported.

'This past year, Egypt posted record-breaking numbers with 8.1 million tourists having visited. From the Gulf alone, tourist numbers have risen over 50% since this time last year, partly due to the many holidaymakers who have chosen Egypt for weekend shopping get-aways,' said Ahmed Khadem, Chairman of the Egyptian Tourist Authority, April 2006.

Retired General Salah al-Din Salim, an Egyptian researcher at the Strategic Studies Institute in Cairo, said that it could not be ruled out that the Israeli Mossad was involved in the terror attack in Dahab.

In the King David Massacre, 1946, Jewish terrorists blew up the King David hotel in Israel, and blamed the atrocity on Arabs.

In the Lavon affair, 1954, Israeli agents planted bombs in several buildings in Egypt, and left evidence behind implicating Arabs as the culprits. One of the bombs detonated prematurely. The Egyptians captured one of the bombers and rounded up the Israeli spy ring.

In 1967, six Israeli planes, three torpedo boats and two assault helicopters attacked the USS Liberty. 24 Americans were killed.

Former paramedic Sandra Uttley is going to the European Court of Human Rights to demand a new inquiry into the 1996 Dunblane tragedy in which 16 children and their teacher were shot dead by Thomas Hamilton.

Sandra Uttley claims that elements of the police were part of a paedophile ring and part of a cover-up.

Uttley said: "There are glaring anomalies in the inquiry, inconsistencies in witness testimony, incorrect information given on oath and the absence of vital witnesses.

"It is also blatantly obvious that Central Scotland Police, who were chosen to investigate the background to the murders, should never have been involved in a so-called independent inquiry.

"They were implicated in the events under scrutiny and continually provided Hamilton with renewals of his gun licence despite long-term and repeated warnings that this should not happen.

"It was known that Hamilton had friends in the police force, including one highly placed officer.

"I believe that Hamilton was a major provider of pornographic photographs and videos to a ring of men prominent in Central Scotland, including police officers who protected him from numerous allegations of physical abuse at boys' camps and clubs he ran.

"They protected themselves after the massacre which conveniently ended in his suicide".

US control of UK members of parliament? The McKie case, in Scotland, was about fingerprint evidence. "It was alleged yesterday that the McKie inquiry was closed down as a result of involvement by the FBI who were concerned that question marks... would spread to the Lockerbie case... Members of the Scottish Parliament yesterday rejected by 64 votes to 51 the SNP motion, which claimed the issues in the McKie case went to the heart of public trust in the criminal justice system.Court costs ruling may open new chapter in McKie case

TEHRAN, Apr. 22 (MNA) -- The April 22 edition of the Israeli daily Haaretz quoted Zionist security officials as saying that the Mossad is plotting to assassinate Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

The daily also quoted Israeli security affairs analyst Amir Oren as saying that Zionist security organizations are planning to assassinate the Iranian president and Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya.

Oren also claimed that Israel will not face very many problems or serious reaction from the international community after the assassination of these two figures.

Haaretz stated that the final decision on the assassination of Ahmadinejad and Haniya would be taken upon the approval of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

The publication of such news in the Israeli media and the explicit statements of the Zionist security officials about the assassination of prominent figures indicate that Israel is still vigorously pursuing a policy of state terrorism while the international community, and particularly the United States and its Western allies, the self-proclaimed standard-bearers of the global war on terrorism, have failed to take any measures against this ominous phenomenon.

Also, in the past, Israel has assassinated a great number of Palestinian and Lebanese figures, including the famous caricaturist Naji al-Ali, and a number of fighters including Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyyad), Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), former Islamic Jihad secretary general Fat’hi Shaqaqi, Palestinian political leader Kamal Adwan, and former Hezbollah secretary general Seyyed Abbas Mousawi.

It should be noted that after all these assassinations, international organizations took no appropriate measures against the Zionist regime for these despicable crimes.

Obviously, when both the United States and its Western allies encourage Israel to commit such crimes and to intensify its state-sponsored terrorism, we cannot expect to see global terrorism eradicated. Violence always begets violence.

Flouting international law and enjoying the financial and propaganda support of the United States and its Western allies, Israel, which as the center of international terrorism has trained hundreds of agents to assassinate prominent political figures throughout the world, is trying to suppress the worldwide anti-Zionist movement through the use of force and terror tactics.

Yet, if state-sponsored terrorism, which the Zionist regime is trying to develop, is not addressed, it will eventually become a directionless blind terrorism that will threaten global security.

International organizations, and particularly the United Nations, should immediately condemn the Zionist regime for its threat to assassinate the Iranian president since ignoring such problems will lead to the law of the jungle ruling the international community.

Although the Zionist regime will never dare to assassinate the Iranian president, its explicit threat to assassinate President Ahmadinejad will increase Islamic nations’ hatred of Israel, eventually to the point where the United States and its Western allies will no longer be able to control the situation.

Zionist officials should be prosecuted by an international tribunal for carrying out acts of state-sponsored terrorism because the Middle East will definitely witness a new wave of insecurity if these threats continue.

The publication of such threats is an explicit violation of international law. The United Nations should take serious action to confront this so that no other regime will ever dare to try to deal with its opponents through the use of force and violence.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Sometimes referred to as The Aladdin of Syria he is otherwise known as Luai Sakra (UID 337070) or Al-Saqa. He was convicted in absentia of involvement with the Jordanian terror group, which planned attacks on the Marriot Hotel in Amman. He is also alleged to have been involved in the terror bombing campaign which took place in November 2003 in Istanbul. He was arrested in August last year (August 2005) in Diyarbakir, Turkey having changed his appearance with the aid of plastic surgery, and was at the time of his capture about to fly to the capital to undergo further surgery. (Cases like these put into question the reliability of photos as a source of ID). Authorities discovered 750 kilograms of explosives in his apartment.

Ercan Gun, at zaman.com 15 Agust 2005, reports on the Syrian 'Al Qaeda Militant' Luai Sakra who was arrested for organizing the double bomb attacks in Istanbul on 15-23 November 2003.Sakra 'has confessed to Turkish police that he provided the attackers of 9 11 with passports'.Sakra 'claims that he knew Muhammad Ata'.Sakra 'claims he drinks alcohol and does not pray'.Sarka reportedly said: “I was one of the people who knew the perpetrators of September 11, and knew the time and plan before the attacks. "I also participated in the preparations for the attacks to WTI and Pentagon. I provided money and passports.”Reportedly, some of the passports, which Sakra claimed to have provided himself, were found in the ruins of WTI.

Von Bulow is a former member of Helmut Schmidt's cabinet in Germany; he is a global intelligence expert.

When asked which parties carried out the 9 11 attack, "Von Bülow said it must have been a 'very small group' within the CIA with the help of Saudi Arabian and Pakistani secret service intelligence."

We would disagree with the idea that it was a 'very small group'.

For the cover up of the 9 11 plot to be successful, the plotters would have had to exercise a very large degree of influence over :

(a) the media in many countries, including such outlets as the BBC and CNN.

(b) the governments of many countries, including the UK and Israel.

(c) the security services of many countries

We should not underestimate the extent to which an inner group within the CIA/Mossad/MI6 etc. controls many top people worldwide.

The media is easy to control because so may top media people are friends of Israel, a country that gained greatly from 9 11.

One assumes that many top government people can be controlled through bribes, sexual blackmail and intimidation.

One suspects that the security services of countries such as the USA and UK are now heavily infiltrated by 'friends of Israel' and friends of the mafia.

In Indonesia, the biggest Moslem country in the world, some of the top security services people reportedly have strong links to Mossad and the CIA.

~~

Von Bülow outlined his view that one reason for the execution of 9/11 was to provide the justification for US military bases in the near and Middle East to be built in anticipation for a future confrontation with China, whom the Neo-Cons believe have grown too powerful and need to have their geopolitical wings clipped.

We could mention other possible reasons for 9 11:

1. To make money for the plotters. Here we are thinking of share deals, heroin from Afghanistan, and profits from war.

Former Helmut Schmidt cabinet member, 25-year German Parliamentarian and global intelligence expert Andreas Von Bülow says that the 9/11 attack was run by the highest levels of the US intelligence apparatus using WTC Building 7 as a command bunker which was later demolished in order to destroy the crime scene.

Speaking to The Alex Jones Show on the GCN Radio Network, Von Bülow said that "the official story is so wrong, it must be an inside job."

Von Bülow discussed the special software programs that allow the CIA to track suspicious stock market movements in real time. Record put options placed on United and American Airlines in the week before 9/11, a speculation that the stock would crash, clearly indicated inside foreknowledge of the impending attack.

"If the stock market has very strange movements immediately they take care of this and they had a lot of tapes and the lawyers told the people destroy these tapes."

"The Bush administration is in a deep defensive [mode] and probably they would like to come out with a new offensive," said Von Bülow as he considered whether a new staged false flag terror attack could be launched to further an interventionist agenda.

"I would hope that one 'new Pearl Harbor' is enough," said Von Bülow, "but I cannot be sure."

"The towers came down in the velocity of free fall which is totally impossible, they fall down in 8, 9, or 10 seconds, the pancake theory is ridiculous," he said.

Von Bülow also highlighted the fact that there were 67 successful intercepts of errant aircraft in the year of 2001 before 9/11 and yet four planes were allowed to veer wildly off course without any being intercepted on that one day.

Rudolph Giuliani opened a $13 million emergency Command Center (pictured) on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building 7 in June 1999 in part to respond to and manage terrorist attacks.

Von Bülow referenced the command bunker in Building 7, calling it the "optimal place" to run the attacks using remote control technology to guide the planes in and then destroying the crime scene by imploding the building.

"There were two procedures, one was flying in the aircraft the second was the explosions," he said.

When asked precisely which parties carried out the attack Von Bülow said it must have been a "very small group" within the CIA with the help of Saudi Arabian and Pakistani secret service intelligence.

Von Bülow outlined his view that one reason for the execution of 9/11 was to provide the justification for US military bases in the near and Middle East to be built in anticipation for a future confrontation with China, whom the Neo-Cons believe have grown too powerful and need to have their geopolitical wings clipped.

Friday, April 21, 2006

The editorial in yesterday's Jakarta Post, headed The politics of power, says the following:

Were it not for the corruption-infested public procurement system and the potential conflicts of interest of several members of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's Cabinet, the proposed crash program to build several coal-fired power plants with a total capacity of 10,000 megawatts within the next three years would not have set off such a heated controversy.

However, the government's plan to "expedite" the tendering of the projects and the crash program was allegedly derived from a proposal by Vice President Jusuf Kalla's younger brother Achmad Kalla, the chairman of the Bukaka engineering company.... there are only a small number of local contractors qualified to build major power plants.

What makes the public more apprehensive is the fact that the families of senior politicians and some Cabinet members, including Jusuf Kalla and Aburizal Bakrie, the coordinating minister for the people's welfare, control the largest of the big contractors.

Thursday, April 20, 2006

A quote from an article by Wilfred P. Deac in the Military History Magazine, 20 April 2006:

http://www.historynet.com/mh/bl-suez-canal/It was a classic setting for international intrigue, a tile-roofed villa secluded among fog-swirled trees, ivy clinging to building wings clustered around a stunted steeple-like tower. The first group of conspirators landed at a French airfield outside Paris and reached the wall-enclosed villa in an unmarked car during the wee hours of October 22, 1956. Later that Monday morning, French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau visited his office in Paris, then was chauffeured home to switch to his personal car. He soon was at the villa shaking hands with Israel's 70-year-old Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, eye-patched Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan and Defense Ministry Director-General Shimon Peres. British Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd, a key member of the third group of plotters, called his office in London to say he was staying home with a cold. He left England shortly after, to arrive at the villa that afternoon.By the time the tense clandestine discussions--which also included French Premier Guy Mollet and British Prime Minister Anthony Eden--ended two days later in France and England, a secret accord had been reached.Israel wanted an excuse to seize the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula.

Israel held secret talks with Britain andFrance.

The UK Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, agreed to an illegal joint attack on Egypt. Egypt was invaded by Israel on 29th October 1956. Two days later British and French bombed Egyptian airfields. British and French troops landed at Port Said at the northern end of the Suez Canal on 5th November. By this time the Israelis had captured the Sinai peninsula.1. Quotation from an article by Lindsay Frederick Braun in The Historian, 3/22/2003:

"The idea, brought up in conversations at Sevres between 19 and 22 October 1956, was for Israel to invade the Sinai Peninsula as a reprisal for unspecified terrorist acts, at which point the British and French would go through diplomatic motions and end up occupying the Canal Zone...

"The Israelis were to begin on the evening of 29 October, the British and French would deliver ultimatums to Israel and Egypt the following morning, destroy Egypt's air force on the ground early in the morning of 31 October after Nasser's certain rejection of the ultimatum's terms, and follow all of this with landings in the Canal Zone. The agreement on these points was embodied in the Protocol of Sevres, signed on 24 October. The three governments were now linked in the course of intervention and collusion...

"In the event, the Anglo-French landings at the beginning of November were anything but decisive. International outcry--and also notably outrage from within his own party--destroyed Eden's ability to govern. Disapproval from the United States threatened to destroy the British economy."

2. Quotation from Hywel Williams, in the Guardian, 18 October 18, 2001:

"What undid Eden was collusion. The private agreement was that Israel should issue Egypt with an ultimatum to withdraw from the Suez canal - and do so in terms that invited a rebuff. Britain and France would then have a cloak of morality to come in and 'separate the combatants'".

"It rested on a lie – that British and French troops should land in Egypt to "separate" the Egyptian and Israeli armies, even though the British and French had earlier connived at Israel's invasion. Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser was described by the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, as 'the Mussolini of the Nile' even though, scarcely a year earlier, Eden had warmly shaken Nasser's hand in an exchange of congratulations over a new Anglo-Egyptian treaty – shades of Donald Rumsfeld's chummy meeting with the 'Hitler of Baghdad' in 1983. In the end, British troops – poorly equipped and treating their Egyptian enemies with racial disdain – left in humiliation, digging up their dead comrades from their graves to freight back home lest the Egyptians defiled their bodies...

"There was a secret meeting at Sèvres, outside Paris, in which the Israelis, the British and the French agreed that the Israeli army should invade Egypt and that Britain and France would then intervene, instruct the Israeli and Egyptian armies to withdraw their forces either side of the canal, and then place an Anglo-French intervention force in the Canal Zone around Port Said. 'Operation Musketeer', it would be called, and the British people were duly summoned from their postwar lethargy by newspaper editorials that condemned those who questioned Eden's right to use military force...

"At Gamil airport, a young Egyptian guerrilla was seized by the British, who wanted to know the whereabouts of Egyptian arms stores. He later claimed that one of his eyes was cut out by a British interrogation officer after a paratroop doctor was wounded while dropping by parachute, and the other eye taken out later when he refused to broadcast propaganda for the allies..."

The Aphrodite Plot by Michael Jansen 1976, The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion by Brendan O'Malley and Ian Craig (published by I.B. Taurus), The Rape of Greece by Peter Murtagh, and The Wrong Horse by Lawrence Stern.

A deal was discussed by Greek and Turkish ministers in the early 1970s. Cyprus would be split. A Turkish military base would be set up on Cyprus, on the Karpass Peninsula. The mainly Greek part of the Island would join up with Greece.

The USA had a strong interest in Turkey.

The U.S. wanted rid of Makarios, the President of Cyprus. Makarios was seen as being too independent minded; he had left-wing allies; he was a friend of the Arabs; he was opposed to the fascist colonels who ran Greece and who were regarded as CIA assets.

According to Peter Murtagh, the Greek colonels in Athens had allowed Israeli planes to use a U.S. base in Crete to launch the air strikes on Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian air fields that decided the outcome of the 1967 war before Arab and Israeli troops came together on the ground.

According to Jansen: the USA wanted its Greek and Turkish allies in control of Cyprus.

By late 1973, the Greek and Turkish Cypriots were becoming more friendly with each other. They had decided to keep Cyprus united.

Athens and Ankara tried to wreck things.

In July 1974 Greece organised a coup against Makarios. Nicos Sampson became president.

Ankara decided to carry out its own plan to split Cyprus. Turkish troops took over the North of Cyprus in 1974. It is thought that the USA supported the invasion.

According to the Cyprus Mail, 13 November 1999, and the Times Higher Education Supplement, the USA vetoed any British intervention in Cyprus.

The USA "vetoed Britain's intervention in the Turkish invasion to protect its spying bases in northern Cyprus, former British Prime Minister Lord Callaghan has revealed in an interview to a British paper." The US has electronic spying facilities in northern Cyprus.

Callaghan was interviewed for the Times by Brendan O'Malley, co-author with Ian Craig of The Cyprus Conspiracy: American Espionage and the Turkish Invasion.

"Cyprus had extreme value as a centre for electronic surveillance," Callaghan said.

Laumann, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago, says: "Women are very sensitive to the quality of a relationship and when those things aren't in good order they're not interested. It's a way of regulating (pregnancy) and protecting the children."

Another reason for lower levels of sexual satisfaction among women is a lack of foreplay, which is particularly problematic in male-dominated cultures in Asia and the Middle East, Laumann said.

Huw Edwards and Fiona Bruce read the propaganda material ( Iraq has weapons of mass destruction....) as if it was true. There is no hint of irony. Are Huw and Fiona naive or just doing the job for the money?

Take BBC dramas and soaps.

Where are good role models for the kids to follow?

Most BBC drama follows the American model: lots of mayhem, madness and murder.

What should be done about the BBC?

We would suggest sacking the Governors, the Director General and 90% of the big name employees.

Bring in some new talent and make sure none of them are part of some sort of St Johns Wood mafia who all attend the same place of worship.

The original research of Daniel Hopsicker is all about constructing a narrative - identifying the pattern - which takes him a long way from Ground Zero but much closer to the event's organic nature.

His April 17th story, for instance, concerning a DC9 seized in the Yucatan last week after hauling more than five tons of cocaine from Caracas.

A co-owner of the aircraft is Brent Kovac, a Tom Delay appointee to the Business Advisory Council of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

The plane's Florida charter company, "Royal Sons," used to be housed in a hanger at Florida's Ground Zero of Huffman Aviation, from which Mohammed Atta, according to Hopsicker's research, also used to make drug runs to Venezuela.

"A close look at Royal Sons," writes Hopsicker, "reveals evidence indicating that the firm is part of a cluster of related air charter firms being used as dummy front companies to provide 'cover' for CIA flights."

And let's remember, just three weeks after Atta enrolled at his flight school, its right-wing evangelical owner, Wally Hilliard, had his private plane seized with 43 pounds of likely Afghanistan heroin on board.

Hilliard made some calls.

Hilliard wasn't charged.

Hopsicker's narrative is drugs and money, and from Iran/Contra to Indochina's Air America to Bonesmen profiteering by China's Opium Wars, it's a long-established and predictive pattern.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

A new Study shows increased levels of mutation in barn swallows living in radioactively contaminated areas near Chernobyl.

The evidence found by French scientists proves that low intensity radiation has a strong, damaging effect on genes.

Exposure to radiation may reduce levels of chemicals used for DNA repair, and this reduction may account for increased levels of mutation.

Antioxidants in blood, liver and eggs of the barn swallow Hirundo rustica was reduced in Chernobyl, Ukraine, compared to an uncontaminated area, and levels of antioxidants correlated negatively with levels of background radiation.

The frequency of abnormal sperm was negatively related to antioxidant levels in blood and liver.

This is consistent with a hypothetical link between radiation and individual levels of antioxidants, suggesting that levels of mutation differ among individuals due to individual differences in abundance of antioxidants.

According to Greenpeace, radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster may cause as many as 100,000 more cancer deaths than earlier predicted.

Greenpeace says the International Atomic Energy Agency's prediction of just a few thousand casualties grossly underestimates the effects of the radioactive particles released by the explosion, which spread across a large part of Western Europe.

Several million people still live in contaminated areas.

Greenpeace says that radiation affects the immune, circulatory and respiratory systems, and causes an increase in fetal abnormalities and birth defects.

Dr. Oxana Lozova, who works at a children's hospital about 190 miles west of Chernobyl, said, "I think the fallout from Chernobyl has affected the immunity of those who were young children at the time of the disaster.

"We now have to deal with people who are a lot weaker than their fathers and grandfathers were. They're falling ill at an age when they really should still be quite fit."

Monday, April 17, 2006

When he died, Carnegie's last $30,000,000 was given away to foundations, charities, and pensioners.

Carnegie said: "Man does not live by bread alone. I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment which alone can sustain all that is human in man, and I know workmen, and many so-called poor men, who revel in luxuries beyond the power of those millionaires to reach."

BILL GATES has given £14.6 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which tackles diseases such as Malaria in the Third World and promotes education.

JOAN KROC, widow of the founder of McDonald’s, left £850m to the Salvation Army

PIERRE OMIDYAR, the founder of eBay last year alone pledged £55m to kickstart businesses in the developing word.

~~

Carnegie was born in 1835 in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland.

In1848 the Carnegie family left Glasgow for New York.

In 1856 he made his first share deal with Adams Express (forerunner to American Express).

At age of 51, Andrew Carnegie married Louise Whitfield (aged 28).

In 1892 the Carnegie Steel Company was formed with Carnegie's share worth $14million.

In 1901 Carnegie sold his share in Carnegie Steel Co. and became the world's richest man.

A quick history lesson reminds us that the Shah was installed in 1953 after a coup against the populist government of Mohammed Mossadegh. That coup was organized, funded and directed by Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA. The impetus for the coup was Mossadegh’s decision to nationalize Iranian oil...

The Shah was put into power by the CIA but eventually he began to worry the Americans. He appeared to be becoming too powerful and too independent-minded.

In 1979 the Shah was toppled in what was probably partly a CIA operation.

The CIA could have replaced the Shah with EITHER an independent minded liberal secular democracy OR the ayatollahs. A secular democratic government might not have been kind to the US oil companies and Israel. A secular democratic government might have become too powerful.

Jacobs wrote:

Out of what seemed to be nowhere to the western observer, the Ayatollah Khomeini appeared in the capital of Tehran, ready to take over the reins of the revolutionary government.

It has been reported that Britain's MI6 had ties to Khomeini and flew with him back to Tehran.

The current crisis over Iran’s nuclear energy program is a crisis contrived by Washington...For whatever reason, Ahmadinejad has played into Washington’s hands nicely by making bellicose statements and by appearing to be hiding the program’s true intentions...

Some of the sunniest destinations are Cyprus, Greece, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa, Malta and parts of Spain.

There are rainy seasons in countries such as Thailand, India, Malaysia and Singapore. It can be very wet at certain times of year although the rain may only fall for a relatively short part of the day.

Proportion of people who answered the survey question: "Taking all things together, would you say you are: very happy, quite happy, not very happy, or not at all happy?" by stating that they were "Very happy": #1 Venezuela 55% #2 Nigeria 45% #3 Ireland 42% #4 Iceland 42% #5 Netherlands 40% #6 Philippines 40%

Friday, April 14, 2006

...The legend of Flight 93 had everything a nation caught with its pants down needed to feel better about itself: guts, heroism, self-sacrifice.

Best of all, it was marketable - by Hollywood and by a president willing to surf on a kind of heroism notably absent from his own life. (Theatrical release of the second "United 93" movie is scheduled to open April 28.)

Lisa Beamer, widow of the passenger credited with the call-to-arms "let's roll," wrote a bestselling book by the same name, applied for a trademark on the expression, and is now working the Christianist lecture circuit.

Actually, the 9/11 Commission found, the evidence indicates that what Todd Beamer (or someone else) said was not "let's roll," but "roll it" - possibly referring to an airplane service cart the passengers may have wanted to use to break down the door into the cockpit. Too bad-. "Roll it" sounds less cinematic, and more like a book about cinematography...

Though they studied the cockpit recording, the 9/11 Commission found zero evidence that the passenger revolt succeeded, that they made it into the cockpit and, as Bush claimed, "took the plane into the ground."

Tom Kean & Co. offered only conjecture: "The hijackers remained at the controls but must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them."

"Must have." At a time when war can be justified by waving around a bottle of fake anthrax on TV, "must have" is judged adequate proof.

Another eyebrow-raising portion of the official account of Flight 93 states that "the passengers and flight crew began a series of calls from GTE airphones and cellular phones" after the hijacking.

Ever forgotten to turn off your cellphone during a flight? I have. Try it yourself: Cellular telephone calls tend to drop when you're driving at 60 miles per hour; passenger jets travel up to ten times that speed. Moreover, there's zero signal, and thus no ability to place a call, above 8,000 feet. Flight 93, en route from Newark to San Francisco at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, dropped 700 feet when it was hijacked at 9:28 am. Cell calls? Not likely.

The Bush Administration has alternately claimed that the White House, then the Capitol, and finally the White House again was the target of the Flight 93 hijackers.

Sure, it's possible that the same terrorists who didn't know that New Yorkers don't start work until nine - the World Trade Center was struck at 8:42 - wouldn't have thought to check Bush's schedule to find out whether he'd be home that morning. But if the White House was the objective, why not hit it first? After all, if Bush had been home when the news from New York first broke, he would have been whisked away to Dick Cheney's secret undisclosed location. If the government doesn't know what the target was, they shouldn't say that they do.

What happened to United 93? There was almost certainly a passenger uprising. Did it succeed? Probably not.

The 9/11 Commission Report says that "at some time between 10:10 and 10:15" Dick Cheney ordered the Air Force to shoot down the plane, which had turned east towards Washington. The plane had already crashed at 10:03. But the regional air traffic control center in Cleveland asked the FAA whether military fighter jets should be dispatched at flight at 9:36, giving the Air Force more than enough time to intercept before the fatal plunge into the field at Shanksville. Was United 93 shot down, despite the official story?

Local media accounts offer some evidence of that possibility. The September 13, 2001 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, for example:

"In a morning briefing, State Police Major Lyle Szupinka confirmed that debris from the plane had turned up in relatively far-flung sites, including the residential area of Indian Lake [two and a half miles from the crash site]." Flight 93 "headed down...rolled onto its back," and crashed, leaving a smoldering crater.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette again: "[Indian Lake marina employee John] Fleegle said he climbed on the roof of an abandoned cabin and tossed down a burning seat cushion that had landed there. By Wednesday morning, crash debris began washing ashore at the marina. Fleegle said there was something that looked like a rib bone amid pieces of seats, small chunks of melted plastic and checks."

Seats and bones don't fly two and a half miles from a crash. Their location could indicate an initial explosion, such as that from a missile hitting a plane.

According to the leaked official version of 7/7, "The London attacks were a modest, simple affair by four seemingly normal men using the internet."

According to The Observer:

Far from being the work of an international terror network, as originally suspected, the attack was carried out by four men who had scoured terror sites on the internet. Their knapsack bombs cost only a few hundred pounds, according to the first completed draft of the government’s definitive report into the blasts.

So, what is wrong with the official version?

Previously, the authorities had tried to show 7/7 links to al-Qaeda (also known as al CIAda).

1. The alleged ring-leader, Mohammad Siddique Khan, as well as Shehzad Tanweer, appeared in a video sent to al-Jazeera after the bombing that included praise for the attacks from bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri. Did this video come from the usual al-Qaeda (al CIAda) sources.

2. Khan has been linked to the mastermind of the Bali bombings, Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali. According to al-Qaeda analyst Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, Khan had ’met senior leaders of Jemaah Islamiah, including the suspected Bali bombings organiser Hambali.’

3. Mohammed Junaid Babar admitted to helping set up an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan, sending equipment and cash to an al-Qaeda leader there between the summer of 2003 and February 2004. Babar identified Khan from a photo, saying that he met him at an al-Qaeda terror training camp while he was there. Babar also admitted in 2004 to attempting to buy ammonium nitrate for al-Qaeda "with the knowledge that it was going to be used for a plot somewhere in the U.K."

6. A friend of Khan’s, Omar Sharif, reportedly went from Britain to Tel Aviv where he allegedly plotted and participated in a bombing that killed five. Khan was reportedly in Tel Aviv weeks before the attack.

Born in Leeds, Mohammad Sidique Khan spent his working life with young, vulnerable children.The 30-year-old, father to a 14-month-old daughter, Maryam, was a mentor in primary schools for children with learning difficulties. He is known to have taught hundreds of children.

Three years ago, while working at Hillside primary school in the city, he railed against the government for not putting enough money into the education of children with learning difficulties. He said of his work with children of five and upwards: "A lot of them have said this is the best school they have been to."

One child who was taught by him at Hillside said: "He seemed a really kind man, he taught the really bad kids and everyone seemed to like him. He was there about three years and then he went on holiday and never came back. We just knew him as Mr Khan."Did Khan, just like Lee Harvey Oswald and Mohammed Atta, have a double?

One Atta in was Florida in spring 2000, while the original Atta was still in Hamburg.One Atta attended an US officer's training school in Montgomery.The Egyptian architecture student Atta had a fear of flying.

Is all the terror the work of some group within the security services?~~

Mrs Thatcher looked after the super-rich and Tony Blair has continued this policy.

According to Campbell:

Hywel Williams's central claim is that we are ruled by a financial elite.

The financial elite have huge salaries and even bigger bonuses.

The financial elite include consultants, accountants and hedge-fund managers.

The financial elite corrupt the politicians.

Campbell writes:

The cosy relationships between ministers and a succession of dodgy financiers reflect a political culture which has sold out to business, most wickedly in the ongoing scandal of PFI deals by which the public is systematically ripped off. Even party conferences are now sponsored by companies in pursuit of contracts. The new post-Thatcherite consensus politics has reverted to an 18th-century struggle for patronage and place.

Williams tells us that "social mobility is now lower in Britain than... in any other advanced country with the exception of the USA."

What neither Williams nor Campbell tell us is who are the brains behind the financial elite.